The 100 best last lines from novels, as chosen by the American Book Review
Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days. – Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Could be presented better, but interesting nonetheless.
via Kottke
The Observer shows us their top 50 blogs, and the top 5 were:
The Huffington Post
Boing Boing
TechCrunch
Kottke
Dooce
via Kottke
The Man in Seat Sixty-One has been one of my favourite travel websites for a few years now - it contains all the information you could ever hope to know about train travel around the world. Along with WikiTravel, this is an indispensable travel website: you’ll never buy an out-of-date travel book again!
Many people would rather not fly, or like me, simply prefer a more civilised, comfortable, interesting, adventurous, romantic, scenic, historic, exciting and environmentally-friendly way to travel. Travelling by train from London to Europe is really easy, but finding out about it (and how to book it) can be frustratingly difficult. Most travel agents only sell flights and packages. Eurostar concentrates on getting you only as far as Paris or Brussels. Even the specialist agencies that sell European train tickets tell you to ‘contact them for details’ and would rather sell you a railpass than get you from A to B. No-one provided basic train times, fares and ‘how to’ information for train journeys from the UK to Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Greece, Russia and so on. Let alone how to reach Morocco, Tunisia, Ibiza, Corsica, Crete or Malta by combining train and ship. I thought it was a gap that needed filling, and that I could easily fill it myself.
The Man’s absolute top travel tip?
“Never travel without a good book and a corkscrew…”
NPR’s All Things Considered recently profiled David Swensen and analysed his investing strategy (Swensen is Yale University’s head investor):
Yale University recently announced a 23 percent return on its investments, swelling its endowment to a whopping $18 billion. The man behind that investment success is David Swensen, one of the most gifted investors in the world. He’s made an average 16 percent annual return over 21 years — better than any portfolio manager at any other university.
Nobody has numbers that good. Not at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, or any foundation or pension fund; Swensen consistently beats them all. [...] Yale pays Swensen $1.3 million a year. That sounds impressive until you realize that, with his track record, if Swensen started his own hedge fund, he could earn $50 million to $100 million a year.
Swensen’s investment formula takes the pain out of asset allocation. All you need to do is adjust the percentages and fund locations depending on your age, your assets, and your risk appetite. Perfect.
Y Combinator is a seed-stage startup venture capital firm with a refreshingly novel outlook on venture capitalism. Their Startup Library provides a wonderful selection of links to stories, articles, and many other resources.
Be careful; once you start thinking about going ’startup’ you’re likely not to go back for a long, long time.